103: How to raise a child who uses their uniqueness to create happiness

Dr. Rose defines a Dark Horse as someone who uses a variety of unusual strategies like understanding their 'micromotives' and not worrying about their overall destination and to focus instead on more immediate goals to create a fulfilled life.

In his book he focuses on the paths adults have followed to become Dark Horses, which is almost invariably one of either:

1. Child is successful in school, attends an elite university, achieves financial stability, realizes they feel unfilled, and switches direction mid-life
2. Child flounders in school and barely graduates or doesn't graduate; gets married and has children or works a series of low-level jobs before discovering their path

But I wondered: rather than following either of these (highly frustrating!) paths, could we instead support our children much earlier in life to discover how their passions can lead them toward a fulfilling life, rather than forcing them through a standardized system and then making them figure it out on their own later?

Dr. Rose agreed that this would indeed be the preferable path, and we also talked about how to do this.

Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment can be purchased in your local bookstore or on Amazon. (Affiliate link)  

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All the usual stuff applies - sliding scale pricing, money back guarantee. Enrollment will open again soon. Click the banner to learn more!     Here is Dr. Rose's interview on The Art of Manliness, where you can learn more about how his approach could help you as an adult to become more of a Dark Horse     [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen 00:01:25 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today's episode comes to us via a bit of a different route than they often do. A friend of mine actually heard our guests, Dr. Todd Rose on The Art of Manliness podcast and said, “Hey, you might want to listen to this because it sounds a lot like what you're trying to do with the way your daughter Carys learns”. And I listened to the episode and then I did something I've never done before. The message that I heard from Dr. Rose on the podcast made him feel like such a kindred spirit in terms of how we think about learning and work, that I reached out to him and asked him to talk with us even before I read his book. And rather than go over ground that's already been covered elsewhere, I'd really encourage you to go to this episode's page at YourParentingMojo.com/DarkHorse to find a link to that episode on The Art of Manliness because there's so much there to help adults discover and follow their passions if you're feeling unfulfilled in the work that you do and that you might need some help charting a different course.   Jen 00:02:20 So, today we're going to look at the outcomes for what Dr. Rose calls dark horses, but we'll specifically focus on how we can support children in navigating their path to becoming a dark horse, which involves identifying your skills and true motivations and harnessing those to do work that you're truly passionate about. And on the related note, I wanted to let you know about a pilot program that I'm running that's open for signups right now. It's called Your Child's Learning Mojo and it will help parents to support their children's intrinsic motivation to learn. If your child is in the early preschool years right now, then you're probably inundated with their questions about the world, but research shows that by the early school years, children learn that their own questions aren't really valued anymore and what counts is whether they know the answers to questions that other people have asked and yet the ability to formulate questions and ask them and know how to find some initial answers and then circle back to a deeper level of questions and explore ideas with both depth and breadth and demonstrate that learning to communities that care about the topic is going to be a foundational set of skills for life 20 years from now and in the age of search engines, the ability to recall an answer is already pretty well obsolete.   Jen  00:03:25 If we're worried about our children's success when they graduate from school and maybe college, then we might be tempted to teach them a skill like coding and while there are plenty of apps and afterschool clubs and summer camps that have popped up, which imply that if you aren't teaching your child to code, then you're making an error that says fundamental is not teaching them how to read. Developers tell us that coding isn't about getting the syntax of code right. It's about having an idea, proposing a solution, seeing if it works, delving deeply into an issue, developing creative solutions to problems and sticking with it when it repeatedly fails while you try different approaches and improve on them each time you take another run at it. Teaching the syntax of coding doesn't teach any of those skills, but harnessing your child's natural intrinsic motivation to learn does support the kinds of skills that will be needed to learn coding and complex problem solving and critical thinking and creativity and all of the other skills the experts know are really going to be important in the future.   Jen 00:04:20 In their book Becoming Brilliant that we looked at way back in episode 10 psychologists, Dr. Roberta Golinkoff and Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek argued that schools are doing really well at preparing our children for the kinds of jobs that existed in 1953 and there are some places where schools are beginning to shift their approach. But in general, being in school means mostly being tested on your ability to remember facts rather than developing the critical skills. So, if we want our children to have these critical skills, it's really on us as parents to make it happen. And the good news is that children come out already prime to develop these skills. We know they have boundless curiosity and they want to delve deeply into topics that interest them, whether it's dinosaurs or beading or construction. And if we can just learn how to become their guide on the side, who connects them to resources and helps them to deepen the work they're already doing, rather than the sage on the stage who provides all the answers, then we'll be able to help our children become the profoundly fulfilled dark horses that Dr. Rose will describe.   Jen 00:05:20 I took a career coaching course a while back and I'm still in its Facebook group and almost without fail, the people who sign up for the course and introduce themselves, give some variation of the story, “I did well in school and I got a good job and I made quite a bit of money and now I'm approaching midlife I realized I'm really unsatisfied and I'm here to discover my true passion so I can live a life that feels meaningful to me.” So, as good as that career coaching course was and it was really good, my goal with this episode and with Your Child's Learning Mojo membership is to make that course obsolete for that purpose because instead of getting to midlife and realizing they're incredibly unfulfilled, our children will engage in activities and learning that fulfill them from the very beginning and as they live their lives, they'll continually reassess their passions and whether their work is in service of their passions and have the knowledge and ability and desire to make micro adjustments as they go along.   Jen 00:06:09 So, they never reach that breaking point and instead they'll become dark horses who were truly connected to work that they find meaningful throughout their lives. So, if you'd like to learn more about how to do this, please do go to YourParentingMojo.com/LearningMojo to see how I will support you in this work. I'll teach you what's going on in children's minds when they learn and why the kinds of strewing activities that you see all over Pinterest are really just the very beginning of that process and don't help your children to learn much that's meaningful or connected to their own interests. We'll begin a learning journal that you can use to identify your child's interests and passions and then engage with these in a way that supports your child in developing the critical skills of the future. And we'll understand how to use nature as inspiration for developing questions and ideas and a sense of wonder.   Jen 00:06:52 You'll become a member of a learning community of parents who will support each other in developing our own skills so we can help our children. And of course you'll get my guidance as well. So if you're interested in participating, please head on over to YourParentingMojo.com/LearningMojo for all the details and just sign up. The group is currently accepting new members through January 31st and we'll get started on February 1st. So to make a formal introduction to our guests today, Dr. Rose is a lecturer on education and leads the Laboratory for the Science of the Individual at Harvard University. His work is focused on the intersection of individuality and personalization applied to help people learn, work and live. He's the author of the books, The End of Average and most recently Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment. Welcome Dr. Rose.   Dr. Rose 00:07:36 Thanks for having me.   Jen: 00:07:37 And so before we kind of dig into the real meat here, I wonder if you can set the stage by telling us what is a dark horse?   Dr. Rose 00:07:45 Yeah. So from our work, we've found that sort of the traditional definition is really there are people who end up being successful that nobody saw coming, right? And that can be because they were viewed as failures early and then succeeded or because they end up being successful in one domain, but then make these pivots and ended up doing stuff that's completely different. And again, nobody sees them coming.   Jen: 00:08:09 And in some ways this resonated with me so much when I read it because in a way I think of myself as a dark horse. You know, I got degrees from Berkeley and Yale and a job at a prestigious consulting company and I really did enjoy what I was doing for a while in sustainability consulting. But the work that I find really so fulfilling came after I got a Master's in Psychology, which was focused on Child Development and then another in Education and sharing this through the podcast with other people that, I mean it just keeps me going, keeps me getting up in the morning and I would never have seen that coming.   Dr. Rose 00:08:43 You're hitting on something really important, which is like, you know, ever since the term dark horse was created quite a while ago to talk about things that are successful that no one sees coming, in our research in the dark horse project, this is exactly what we found, right? ‘Cause we were interested in why do these folks get off the beaten path and yet still end up surprising us and to a person, the thing that kept emerging was the way they thought about success in life. And rather than playing by sort of society's definition of success or somebody else's view, they were deeply focused on pursuing personal fulfillment. And given that it's so personal, it’s so individual, the things that light you up, it's not surprising in a standardized society that it often requires getting off the beaten path to make it happen.   Jen 00:09:29 Yeah. And okay, so let's talk about that standardization because I mean this is a question that seems like it should be really simple, but of course it isn't and it has so much to do with learning and how we think about school. And so how do children, and we're thinking about children, but of course it's applicable to all people as well, how do they learn best?   Dr. Rose 00:09:48 Yeah. It's funny, right? Because that seems like something that is so obvious, but in many ways it runs so counter to the way we actually educate. So if you think about some of the basics like it won't sound like rocket science, right? Not surprisingly, kids that are learning in ways that are engaging to them are going to learn better. That sounds almost silly, silly obvious, but it is surprising how much we neglect that. So if you're engaged, if you're motivated, which I think are related at the same thing, if the learning is contextualized in a relevant way, right? So it's not just abstracted away from your real life but deeply embedded into it when people are more active rather than passively learning. And one of the things that's really important is the extent to...